If Juan López Moctezuma had only ever gifted the world Alucarda, his seat in the pantheon of cult cinema would already be upholstered in velvet and stained with theatrical blood. But Moctezuma wasn’t just a director; he was a surrealist provocateur who served as the head of programming for Televisa and worked as the producer/right-hand man to Alejandro Jodorowsky on El Topo and Fando y Lis.

The film follows a journalist who treks to a remote, mist-shrouded institution to profile the revolutionary “System of Soothing” pioneered by the esteemed Dr. Maillard (Claudio Brook, Alucarda, The Devil’s Rain!). The pitch? Treat the mentally ill by allowing them to indulge their delusions rather than chaining them to walls. However, the progressive atmosphere quickly curdles into something far more sinister. The reporter discovers a chaotic, ritualistic society where the doctor’s daughter, Eugenie, tells the reporter that he hasn’t met the real doctor, just one of the inmates who is quite literally running the asylum and randomly quoting Aleister Crowley. Even better — Susana Kamini, Justine from Alucarda, shows up as a cult priestess!

Imagine if Hammer or Amicus made a movie in Mexico, with all of the dialogue in English, and fed massive amounts of drugs to everyone involved. That’s pretty much how I imagine that this film was made. It’s also an Edgar Allan Poe story (The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether), but really, it’s also a costume drama with more powdered wigs than a British courthouse.